macrumors member

I wanted to stick a cheap SSD in an old 2005 iMac I had lying around, since I was so impressed with the improvement in performance in everything else Id stuck an SSD in. I didnt need very much storage capacity at all, I really only needed enough for the operating system, a few programs, a few 64kbit/sec MP3s, a movie or two I figured 32GB was all I needed. This iMac is not a main computer of mine, it sits out in the home gym for a bit of music, web browsing, movies, etc. I wanted speed and didn't need capacity.

I hopped on eBay, eventually settled on one that seemed quite common. Brand name is KingSpec, never heard of them before, but at $39, I figured it was a worthwhile gamble. Turns out I was correct; I installed it in the iMac, taped it in place (Im apparently too cool for things like mounting brackets), cloned the system back over, and it all worked perfectly. Despite the SATA I limitation of the old iMac, sustained read speeds were hitting a consistent 130MB/second. That matches the high end SSDs Ive got in other computers that are also bottlenecked by SATA I.

Anyway, that KingSpec drive has performed flawlessly for the six or so weeks Ive had it. Performance is still just as good, and 75% of the drive has been used.

How to find them:

Search on eBay for KingSpec SATA SSD 64GB, without the quotation marks, and substituting the 64 for however many GB of storage you want. If I remember correctly, there were also 16GB drives going for about $29, and 256GB ones, but the 256GB drives were actually slightly more expensive than the same capacity OWC Mercury SSD I have.

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